SLPAD - 96 - "Low-Lands" - 9

[Michael Bailey]

Backtracking for a minute:

“You keep that weird crew down in the rumpus room...."


“Rumpus room” isn’t heard much now, but I remember hearing it as a kid, and
the idea of having a place for rumpuses is a good one in general.



“What Flange should have answered but didn’t was something like, “Rocco
Squarcione is not an animal, he is a garbage man with a fondness, among
other things, for Vivaldi.” It was Vivaldi they were listening to now,
Sixth Concerto for Violin, sub-titled Il Piacere, while Cindy stomped
around upstairs.”


a) garbage man is a big step up from animal, but still sounds mildly
pejorative. Rocco did call Dennis "sfacim'" though, so he's not likely to
take offense.

b) Vivaldi - he wrote a shed load of concertos. The two wine drinkers in
the rumpus room could easily spend a whole day on Vivaldi concertos.

https://www.grahamsmusic.net/post/not-the-four-seasons-vivaldi-s-concertos

I was trying to find some scholarly writing on "Il Piacere" and this at
least mentions it, though the main thrust of the article is an executive
summary of Vivaldi's concertos.

No mention of the Kazoo Concerto - however, the article mentions that
violin concertos were the norm and it wasn't till Opus 10 (each of opuses 3
thru 9 consisting of a collection of concertos, all for violin except for 2
for oboe) that Vivaldi swam against the current and issued six flute
concertos.

So - Vivaldi stuff of interest that I didn't know:

He wrote some of these for musically inclined children in an orphanage
called the Pietà

He stopped publishing concertos eventually because it was more lucrative to
sell manuscripts of them instead

Archivists discovered Vivaldi's personal stash of 500 some manuscripts back
in the 1920s

One begins to appreciate the possibility of a Kazoo Concerto:

About 230 are for violin

40 for bassoon - article speculates that the Pietà produced some bassoon
virtuosos

30 for cello

20 for oboe

15 for flute

7 for viola d'amore (I'm picturing a violin with extra strings set up like
a 12 string guitar?)

(Quoting from the article)
There are many concertos for other instruments - recorder, a small recorder
called a *flautino,* and mandolin, for example - but beyond this there are
the works for multiple soloists. Some of Vivaldi’s concertos for two
soloists pair similar instruments, like two violins or two trumpets, but
some call for unusual pairings, like violin and organ, or viola d’amore and
lute. We know of about 30 concertos requiring three or more soloists and
some of these call for very new or very rare instruments, such as the
clarinet, the early form of the clarinet known as the chalumeau, large
lutes called theorbos, timpani, and unusually-adapted violins called
“violins in tromba marina”. This concerto calls for *eleven* soloists: two
recorders, oboe, chalumeau, violin, two “viole all’inglese” (viola
d’amore-type instruments), two violins in tromba marina and two
harpsichords. Somewhere in the background there’s a string orchestra
accompanying all that…


Finally, there are six concertos with soloists accompanied by not one but
two string orchestras. Some of these have a single violin as the soloist,
another calls for two solo organs, while yet another calls for two solo
violins and two solo organs. This grandest of these is a spectacular
concerto in A, calling for two violins, two recorders and a cello as
soloists with the first orchestra, while the second orchestra has two
violins, two recorders, cello and organ as its soloists.

And in addition to all this (!) there are two other fascinating areas of
Vivaldi’s concerto writing. The first of these are the roughly sixty
concertos which have no soloists at all. These are works for string
orchestra which Vivaldi titled “concerto” but which have no solo part. They
seem to embryonic symphonies (and some are called “sinfonia” rather than
“concerto”); they’re a fascinating precursor to the symphonies of the later
Italians such as Sammartini.

The other type of concerto Vivaldi wrote had no orchestra. These are works
for an ensemble of at least three soloists with continuo, and more than
twenty of them survive. The instruments combine and divide to make
alternating tutti and solo textures, exactly as JS Bach did with the eleven
players in his third Brandenburg concerto.